Known automatic dispensing machines, e.g. for dispensing sheets of paper, include:
guide means for guiding a stack of objects to be dispensed,
a drive wheel which rotates on an axle and is disposed facing one end of the stack so as to be able to come into contact with the object situated at the bottom or end of the stack, means being provided to move the stack towards the wheel,
a motor for rotating the wheel, and
a controlled spacer device which can be in either one of two states, one of which is an active state in which the stack is moved away from the drive wheel so as to prevent contact between the drive wheel and said object situated at the bottom or end of the stack, and the other of which is a passive state in which the drive wheel can be brought into contact with the object so that the drive wheel drives the object out of the stack.
The stack is often vertical and the drive wheel is disposed above the stack on which it is pressed by automatic control means. Such dispensing machines are perfectly suited to high-speed dispensing of sheets of paper which are always identical to feed a copying machine, but they are relatively expensive, in particular because it is necessary to shift the rotation axle of the drive wheel downwards. Also, French patent application No. 2 117 742 filed on December 15, 1971, for "A machine for dispensing objects at the outlet of a dynamic stock", describes a dispensing machine for dispensing relatively thick and rigid objects such as parallelepipedic boxes. In this dispensing machine, the object situated at the bottom of an inclined stack is raised perpendicularly to the axis of the stack, by an inflatable bladder whenever required, to make it pass beyond a fixed stop at the bottom of the stack. It is then desirable to dispose the greatest length of the object along the axis of the stack and hence to have a very long stack, the dispensing machine then being too bulky to be placed in premises which are accessible to the public.
The present invention aims to provide an automatic dispensing machine for dispensing stacked objects which is particularly simple to manufacture and operate and is applicable in particular to dispensing medicine in parallelepipedical boxes.